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Swedish Salad
Take a couple of pickled herrings, cut off the heads and tails, remove the bones, and divide the flesh into dice. Mix with these two apples, peeled and sliced, two large boiled potatoes cut into dice, an equal quantity of cold roast beef, and a little sliced beetroot. Add a table-spoonful of sliced gherkins, a table-spoonful of capers, a table-spoonful of shredded tarragon-leaves, two table-spoonfuls of chopped chervil, and a hard-boiled egg finely minced. Season the salad rather highly with pepper, salt, oil, and vinegar. Put the whole in a salad-bowl and serve. A dozen or more freshly-opened oysters may, if liked, be laid upon the top of the salad, and various additions may be made to it. Picked shrimps, filleted anchovies, dressed Brussel sprouts, olives, curled celery, and green onions may all be introduced at discretion, and any other kind of dried or pickled fish may be used instead of herrings, if preferred.
A composed cold salad of the Scandinavian sillsalad type, built from leftovers and pickle jars. The one thing that decides whether it looks appetising is when the beetroot goes in.
- Beetroot last, and drainedSliced beetroot bleeds into potato, apple and egg within minutes. Fold it in at the very end, or lay it around the edge of the bowl, and pat it dry first.
- Which pickled herringThe book assumes salt-cured or vinegar-cured herring bought whole. Modern jarred herring fillets in vinegar or wine work directly and need no boning; if you use heavily salted barrel herring, soak it in cold water or milk for several hours and taste before dicing.
- Cut everything the same sizeRoughly 1 cm dice for herring, potato and beef. Note that the recipe slices rather than dices the apple; dice it to match if you want a uniform salad.
- Apple choiceA firm tart apple holds its shape and balances the vinegar. Toss the slices in a little of the vinegar as you cut them so they do not brown.
- "An equal quantity of cold roast beef"Equal to the potatoes, so two large potatoes' worth; weigh the diced potato and match it. Cold rare roast beef is best; boiled beef also works.
- Chervil and tarragonTwo tablespoons of chopped chervil is a lot by modern shopping habits and chervil is often unobtainable. Flat-leaf parsley with a little extra tarragon, or dill, is a common substitution; dill is widely used in Swedish cooking today.
- The dressingNo quantities are given. Three parts oil to one part vinegar, about 4 tablespoons of dressing in total, is enough to coat this volume without pooling. "Rather highly" seasoned means salt and pepper to the point where you notice them against the cold ingredients.
- Rest before servingDress and leave covered in the refrigerator for 30 minutes so the potato takes up the vinegar, then correct the seasoning. Cold food needs more salt than warm.
- Yield and the oystersServes four to six as a first course or light lunch. The oysters go on raw at the last moment as a garnish; anyone avoiding raw shellfish should leave them off, and the shrimps or anchovies mentioned do the same job.
This is the Victorian English translation of Swedish sillsalad, the beetroot-and-herring salad still eaten at Christmas and Easter in Sweden, and a close relative of the German Heringssalat. The dictionary includes it among the salads at a time when British cookery was busily importing "foreign" cold dishes, arguably as a genteel way of using up cold roast joints, and a salad that absorbs yesterday's beef, yesterday's boiled potatoes and a jar of pickles suited a household economy that threw very little away. The long closing list of permitted additions — shrimps, anchovies, olives, celery, green onions, any other pickled fish — is characteristic of the dictionary's approach: a template rather than a fixed formula, which is also how the dish is treated in Scandinavia, where no two families build it quite alike.